The online tools currently provided to display and view the millions of reviews of retail products, comprising consumer goods and services is limited. Generally a user can only retrieve a listing of user reviews and at best sort them by a rating that the user gives to a product in addition to the review text submitted. There has been very little done with regard to analyzing the review text directly for relevant details to provide to the end user evaluating a product's reviews to determine if s/he wants to purchase the product.
For example, United States Patent Application 20130066800 entitled “METHOD OF AGGREGATING CONSUMER REVIEWS” by Falcone et al, discloses a computer-based review website, system, and method that automatically aggregates relevant reviews onto an individual, first computer-based review website to enhance searches performed by consumers and enhance the SEO for companies that depend on such consumer searches. But, the system provides no analysis of the reviews to generate metrics as a means to objectively compare and contrast similar products. The system also relies only on consumer reviews and not industry expert reviews, which provide a more reliable evaluation of a product's advantages and disadvantages to the consumer.
Similarly, United States Patent Application 20120185455, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD OF PROVIDING SEARCH QUERY RESULTS”, by Hedrevich discloses a system and method for searching and ranking information based on consumer product reviews with a search engine that allows the user to search a database by using terms that describe a product based on other users' comments. Search results may include the product review information, the product name, the product picture, the product price, and users reviewed excerpts. And while an algorithm is disclosed for computing the relevance ranking using Levenshtein distance, Okapi BM25 factor, and Phrase proximity ranking algorithms, no analysis is conducted to compare and contrast competitive products.
And while United States Patent Application 20130066873 A1, entitled “AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF DIGITAL COMPOSITE PRODUCT REVIEWS” discloses an automated computer system for computing the representativeness, coherence, liveliness, and informativity of a composite review. A composite review (compilation of multiple user reviews) is deemed “lively” the review contains at least one superlative word; the phrase contains at least one comparative word; the phrase contains at least one degree modifier word; etc.; and, likewise for computing the representativeness, coherence, and informativity. But again, the automated system does not compare and contrast via objective statistical analysis different products from the same class.
These inventions do not disclose comparing and contrasting different retail products using statistical analysis or other computing methods to highlight the most positive and most negative features of the product as determined by multiple reviewers, and to quantify the ratings of the particular features; as well as to provide separate displays of reviews by professional industry reviewers versus non-technical user reviewers.
Neither do these systems provide a cross-referencing feature to display another product: 1) that a reviewer rated as highly as the product that the user is investigating in order for them to comparison shop; nor 2) that a reviewer who gave a negative rating to the user's product of interest, alternatively rated other products as highly in order for the user to find a better product.